BuddyPress.org

I think Andy is assuming that you want Friends to be the default view for every kind of activity stream. If you change it in activity-loop.php, it’ll change for every instance of the activity stream. There’s no need to have different versions of activity-loop.php for different sections of the site, as bp_has_activities already does the work of figuring out which page you’re on.

If you only want to default to the Friends view on certain pages, you could put in some conditional logic. Call the global $bp in your template and look for $bp->current_component, $bp->current_action, $bp->action_variables. Use these to sniff out which page you’re on, and use some if-statements so that you only add the ‘&scope=friends’ argument on pages where you want the default to be ‘friends’.